In its corporate mission statement, Google promises to “organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.”1 But what does it mean for information about architecture and history to be useful? There can be little doubt that students of both architecture and history find significant use value in simply having access to a comprehensive database of satellite and aerial photography of most of the earth's built environment, and in having available a corpus of precisely geolocated photographs and photographically rendered digital models of buildings and sites. Furthermore, the utility of introducing historical imagery such as maps and photographs into the same database, enabling the visual comparison of contemporary and past images and the assessment of changes over time, is obvious. All of this is precisely what the original Google Earth platform aimed to provide. A review in this journal almost a decade ago focused on that platform as cartography, and on the ways in which its aerial photographs operated as a database of pictorial evidence.2

Since that time, Google has consolidated its set of geographic tools—Earth, Maps, and Street View, all of which Google acquired in the early 2000s—into one platform: the new Google Earth. The original Earth application promised fully navigable, low-altitude, three-dimensional simulated photographic views of cities and buildings, while Street View added the possibility of remotely viewing full-surround photographic imagery generated from station points on public streets around the world. Operating together, these platforms promised a frictionless freedom of movement and exploration, a kind of universal accessibility unimpeded by travel distances, time differences, and local customs.

Several features distinguish the new Google Earth from its predecessors. Where Maps and Street View were browser based, the original Earth was a desktop application requiring a fairly powerful computer. The new version of Earth has been …